What to do to focus in the Theme, preserve the tone and the existing membership

How and what to do regarding the influx of General instance seeking new members.

A reminder that there are other issues(Non-English Language posts and non-Latin characters script particularly) that we are looking at in a separate thread here - to facilitate a more focused discussion. That thread is located at :

The discussion on the Theme and General posting behaviour has been ongoing for four days at this time, so I consider important to refer to past posts, as many of us made good points, and we could use any insights and consensus to advance this thread’s progress.

This thread is Open to the general membership of QOTO, to read and to participate if they like. Reading can be done as guests, no account in the Discourse (this forum) is needed to read.

Anyone wishing to post a reply is invited to sign up for an account and join the discussion - and we thank you for your participation beforehand.

Previous discussions on the STEM site theme and Focus issue took place in a few different threads, and has happened over the last 4 to 5 days. I will try to list some of them here, please feel free to read them for input, and to mention any other threads, with a link, so we can add to this summary.

There are some paragraphs that can easily come to haunt us. And some changes of topic that would be nicer if we could structure the page a bit. Some sub-headers, etc.

Specifically concerning to me:

We are a free speech, no censorship zone. Feel free to talk about whatever you want, say whatever you want, as long as it is legal and you engage respectfully you won’t ever get banned from the server. With that said we do have a few rules: No spam, and no using multiple accounts to circumvent personal bans, and a few others.

…because, the About This Server says I can talk whaever I want, says user when asked to stay on topic, etc…

I think some of the explanation in that response should be incorporated into the About This Instance page, which I feel needs a bit of an overhaul for consistency and to clarify the issue Jeff explained well and clearly in the post linked.

I was thinking of possibly taking a copy of the present text, work on my view of possible edit and posting it for discussion and review. That could get the ball started, with something on the table for people to look at and discuss.

I’m a firm advocate for semi-open registration using Matodon’s feature for requiring a written submission as to why a user wants to register. @Freemo pointed out that such a thing doesn’t deter bad actors who say one thing and do another, but I believe that even a token barrier is better than none at all.